As electronic systems convert documents and other data into electronic form, many of the documents that have been converted are indexed to facilitate search, retrieval, and/or other functions. For example, legal documents, such as court decisions, briefs, motions, etc., may be stored and indexed for users to access electronically. As different legal documents may include different legal points pertaining to different jurisdictions, those documents may be indexed and organized accordingly. However, problems can arise when using conventional techniques to index and search legal documents. In conventional search engines, search terms are first matched to terms appearing in the body of a document. Documents are then ranked based on the distance between the matched words in the document. However, this approach may be problematic in the context of legal documents and other types of documents that typically contain related, but distinct, sub-topics. Search terms may appear in multiple sections of these types of documents, thereby increasing the document's rank, even though many of the sub-topics within the document are not directly on-point for the user's query. This is particularly problematic when the search query is long or contains non-central terms. A user of such a conventional search system must spend additional time and resources to determine which of the documents in the search results are actually of interest. Due to this failure to distinguish between documents that contain sections that are relevant to the search request and those that contain only tangentially-related sections, such electronic search systems may fail to retrieve many of the relevant documents, thus rendering the electronic search system less effective for its intended purpose.
Accordingly, alternative systems and methods for searching a collection of documents and document retrieval are desired.